Design: May 2004 Archive Page

"They struck his head with a reed and spat on him." -- Mk 15:19

--The Crucifixion (in Lego) (The Brick Testament)

This site, by "Rev" Brendan Powell Smith, features Lego illustrations of Biblical passages -- including many that you don't often see in kiddie books, including the Dueteronomy passages on rape, bestiality, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, and "how long to hang somebody".

I'm fascinated by the scowling face of the rapist who pays the father of a violated virgin 50 shekels, and who then has to marry her. I didn't know there were scowling Lego minifugres.

I don't exactly recommend it for vacation bible school. VeggieTales it ain't.

Jerzies: Tastes Like Cardboard!

After I lamented that I couldn't design a box of cereal for myself, this is apparently Mike Arnzen's way of telling me I'm a flake.

Or maybe just that I stay crispy in milk. Thanks, Mike.

Amusement parks just wouldn't be amusing without all the warnings that we ignore.

• Whipper-Snapper Whiplash Worries
• Bull's-Eye BS
• Astounding Amusement Park Physics

--Dennis G. Jerz

--Cruel Amusement Park Instructions (Jerz's Online Reading Room)

Traditional sources of water collection are from dams, springs, rivers, streams and farm reservoirs, with the introduction of boreholes where these traditional sources of water are unavailable. Until now such boreholes have been operated by handpumps as the use of modern alternatives such as diesel, petrol or electric pumps are costly to install and have the concomitant constant financial burden of fuel and maintenance costs. --Children's roundabout solves the water problem in remote areas (www.roundabout.co.za)

Harnessing the energy of kids playing. Not as efficient as the system featured in The Matrix, perhaps, but still innovative.

I wonder, though... if, as the manufacturer's website says, the chore of carrying water has traditionally fallen to women and children, what will happen when a community depends on a patented roundabout play pump for its water?

My culture teaches me to let kids be kids, and not to give them too many chores. I don't know enough about the cultures being served by this invention to know whether people really would starve, or perhaps not draw enough water for proper hygeine, if the kids didn't have "fun" while doing it. By making water-drawing "fun", is that training a generation of kids not to do anything that isn't fun?

The pump installation also features billboards, two of which are designed to carry health messages, and two more designed to carry local advertising. The income from the advertising is supposed to pay for the maintenance of the facility.

In America we tend to be very sensitive about the presence of advertisements in playgrounds. I personally feel like a sell-out whenever I take the kids to a McDonaldland play gym.

Via metafilter, which points to some interesting discussion on worldchanging.

The perception and use of an avatar - as the primary means of agency in online environments - might be expected to be shaped by the motivations for participating in the environment. In particular, goal-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as tools/pawns to achieve goals, thereby encouraging a preference for 3PP that objectifies and externalizes the avatar, whereas relationship-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as representations of themselves in a social environment, thereby encouraging identification and treating the avatar as the self through 1PP. This would also be supported by the age differences given that younger players tend to be more achievement-driven. In other words, I argue that more fundamental motivational differences are driving the gender and age differences. --Nick Yee --It's a Matter of Perspective (Terra Nova)

Interesting data... Male users were more likely to prefer third-person perspective, while female users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective. Older users were more likely to prefer first-person perspective, while younger users were more likely to prefer third-person.

How much of this is simply becasue it's much easier now to render 3-d worlds on the fly, and to rotate these worlds or make parts of it transparent, so that the player's perspective isn't blocked by walls or other obstacles? Thus, those of us who played graphic games in Ye Olde Days were playing on systems that forced designers to conserve resources whenever possible, and hiding the player (except for an animated shield or sword sweeping through the frame) freed up precious resources for the animation of opponents.

Of course, if it's true that the old gamers included a higher proportion of men, is it significant that new gamers are more likely to prefer the perspective more frequently favored by women? Does it matter whether the men are playing perhaps a half-naked elf babe, as opposed to a muscle-bound, attack-abosrbing brick who wasn't designed with aesthetics in mind?

I just noticed in the discussion at Terra Nova that women are actually more prevalent among the older gamers. Go figure.

I've been playing Morrowind in brief snatches... when I'm up close and in person with the bad guys, I find it disorienting when they slip around behind me or sidestep. I haven't thought of switching to 3PP for battle sequences, because I'm playing a mage and thus would prefer to shoot fireballs from a distance. Still, the occasional rat who scurries about my ankles is annoying enough that maybe 3PP would help.

It looks like the charts on the site were initially posted incorrectly; they've been corrected (according to Yee) but that makes some of the first comments confusing.

Since I started using computers, they've become almost a million times more powerful. Although big computers can be alienating, their evolution generally leads to a better user experience.... Although the bigger, newer mainframe had an actual CRT screen, it also had obscure commands and horrible usability. Worst of all, it was highly alienating because you had no idea what was going on. You'd issue commands, and some time later you might get the desired result. There was no feeling of mastery of the machine. You were basically a supplicant to a magic oracle functioning beyond the ken of humankind. --Jakob Nielsen --Thirty Years With Computers (Alertbox)

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which will be artistic contributions themselves. --Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short --Mystery House Taken Over (Turbulence)

This proposal is one of several that garnered $5000 from the 2004 Turbulene competition. Congrats!

--Playing with 'Web Album Generator'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've got a huge backlog of digital images that I've wanted to post online... I'm using Web Album Generator, which automates the navigation and the thumbnail.

Now making a collection of images is a lot less fiddly -- though I wish it offered some way to add a comment to the main page, or at least a way to link out to some other page besides Web Album Generator's home page. I can probably figure out a way to do that through the style sheet, but I wish there just a box to type in.

But the surprise for Xbox was Advent Rising from Majesco, a super-stylish "Star Wars"-meets-"The Matrix" action adventure, which is being written by sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, best known for the "Ender's Game" series of novels. When writers of his caliber want to work on videogames, it's more proof that electronic entertainment is no passing fad. --N'Gai Croal
--Technology: Your Next Videogame (http://msnbc.msn.com)

You are a student. That should be enough to depress you in these tough economic Liberal dominated times, but you are troubled by a weightier burden - ITEC802. What you though would be a nice little romp in the woods has turned out to be tougher than finding weapons of mass distruction.

You want your life back. --Dave's Stupid Adventure Game Final (IETC 802, Macquarie University)

A final exam in this programming course is to create an interactive fiction game... the excerpt is part of the game's prologue. The original file is a PDF.

These games aren't much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it's significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush's economic policy across to "the kids". But it's hard to say for certain because, so far, the RNC has not talked about the games to the press and they didn't respond to a request for an interview.

However, others are talking about this new campaign strategy - in particular, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two game designers/ researchers who contribute to Water Cooler Games, a blog set up in October to track the development of "video games with an agenda". "I believe in this medium as a more efficient means of communicating social and political messages," says Bogost. "So I'm encouraged when anybody tries it, whatever their political persuasion."

Unfortunately, the games aren't that good, says Frasca. "They look like they were programmed by Bush himself." In particular, Tax Invaders, with its South Park image of bullets flying out of George Bush's head, seems ill conceived. "Knowing his trigger-happy approach to international politics," says Frasca, "this is something that may well backfire." --Jim McClellan --The role of play  (Guardian Unlimited)

Right now, roses can be grown in lots of different shades, including pink, yellow, peach, and even green. But blue roses can only be created artificially; one way is to fresh cut flowers and put their stems in blue-colored water. This is not permanent, and doesn't create a true blue rose. --Karen Lurie --Roses are Blue  (Science Central)

In Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, the gentleman caller remembers that his nickname for the wallflower Laura was "Blue Roses," because that's what he thought she said when she told him she had been absent on account of "pleurosis". It's a touching scene, especially because Jim only remembers it haltingly, while Laura recalls more details, as if it only happened yesterday for her.

Note that this article is a summary of scholarship published elsewhere. I wish more online journalists would credit their sources this way, though I recognize it's not the responsibility of web designers and journalists to correct the sloppiness of students who mistake journalism for academic research. I also appreciate the caption beneath the image of the blue rose, that indicates the picture is fake... still, that caption isn't a part of the image file itself, so this image might still be mistaken for a photo of the real thing.

On another note, I don't like like the sound of the merged verb "to fresh cut". Ah, well... every profession has specialized language. I remember my brother bursting out laughing when I told him about "deproblematize". (Fortunately, I wasn't acutally using the word at the time, I offered it as an example of jargon.)

So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which it handles language. And yet it continues to draw devoted practitioners and interactors. It is, in Montfort?s view, a still vibrant tradition.

Why does IF work despite these design difficulties? Perhaps the answer lies in its structure as a riddle. Riddles, unlike puzzles, are always verbal and are based on a conversational exchange. They are intrinsically interactive, and have a formal syntax, a variant of call-and-response structure. A riddle is a word-puzzle, framed as a conversation. --Janet Murray --Janet Murray responds to Nick Montfort (Electronic Book Review)

Murray notes that the interface innovations that made IF a breakaway success in the 70s (specifically, the fact that the user communicated with the program by typing words that followed a syntax that was at least recognizably a subset of English) is the source of its awkwardness today.

When I first started teaching IF, I noticed newbies tried to use MUD syntax to get around in the world. More recently, students who are used to text messaging each other have to unlearn their IM syntax (which is itself a simplified form of English, with creative spelling "rulz"). Thus, they are so used to communicating with each other via short textual bursts, and they are so used to assuming that the recipient of these messages will be able to deal with typos and irregularities of every sort, that the command-line interface appears much more stringent. Thus, it's an increased familiarity with the command line (as employed in purely social contexts) that distances them from the command line as used in IF.

The discussion also includes Brenda Laurel and a response by Nick Montfort. Part of Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Great reading! But I've got to get back to grading now...

While there might be a future for narrative and new forms of storytelling in this cornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, the largest potential seems to be in new types of games, forms that blend the social and the aesthetic in creative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a new generation of gamers grows up, the word ?game? will no longer be as tainted as it is today. Then euphemisms such as ?story-puzzles? and ?interactors? will no longer be necessary. Games will be games and gamers will be gamers. Storytelling, on the other hand, still seems eminently suited to sequential formats such as books, films and e-mails, and might not be in need of structural rejuvenation after all. If it ain?t broke, why fix it? --Espen Aarseth --Espen Aarseth Responds [to Murray's First Person essay] (Electronic Book Review)

Aarseth responds to an essay by Janet Murray in the Electonic Book Review's remediation of First Person. Murray responds to Aarseth).

I wish this online collection hadn't appeared in the very week when I so desperately seek distractions to help me put off marking huge stacks of papers.

Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game StudiesJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In a comment attached to my blog entry on The Muse of the Videogame, Eyejinx makes an excellent point, an excerpt from which is below:

Unless and until those involved in game studies seriously work with the development process (and perhaps the developers themselves), any proposals for how to go about making games remain in the realm of theory.

In the meantime, as a nascent field of study, those involved in game studies should, perhaps, strive to identify where their work falls in the criticism/craft divide.

I'd agree that theorists often make impractical suggestions, but choosing a starting point that privileges production and development over theory is naturally going to find a theoretical piece lacking. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- academics do write mostly for each other, and specialists in any field tend to develop an elite language, partly out of necessity, but partly as a social signal. (And if you think I'm only talking about the ivory towers, don't forget the 1337 h4xx0r culture.)

Most people who aren't professional athletes have a favorite team; most people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag have some idea of who their favorite actors are, and can recognize and be moved by a good performance. On the other end of the scale, theorists may call for the production of certain texts that don't exist, but that would need to exist in order for them to fully explicate their theories... thus, in literature, we have a tradition of visionary authors writing traditional books about imaginary books (Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths," Stephenson and "The Diamond Age," even Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

People who study the history of the American Revolution aren't necessarily trying to write a how to manual for future revolutionaries... Likewise, if I were to write a paper examining the development of the cave setting in computer games, or the development of inventory-based puzzles, or the rise and fall of text adventures, I wouldn't feel any obligation whatsoever to tell my readers what to do in order to produce these games.

On another note, the best practitioners aren't automatically the best teachers, so I wouldn't be so hasty to elide the difference between teachers of the craft and practitioners of the craft. Obviously theorists need stuff about which to theorize, but their discourse does not necessarily need to be focused towards teaching other people how to create more of the kind of thing that they study... a theorist might instead focus entirely on the effect a particular work had on its surroundings, and if the article or book in question did a good job with that, I certainly wouldn't fault it for not overtly addressing ways to help game development companies make more money.

Plato wrestled with similar issues -- his "Ion" is a dialogue between Socrates and a "rhapsode," a sort of actor/orator/composer who insists that, because he tells good stories about generals, he'd make a better general than the professional soldiers. (We are meant to laugh at this overextension -- after all, since Plato isn't a professional rhapsode, so what does he know about what a rhapsode would say? At the same time I think it's meant to be satire at the expense of the contemporary military leadership.)

It's a simple truth nowadays that among the people whose lives are being affected by computer games include many who aren't computer programmers, who have never taken a course in computer programming, and who aren't very good at the kind of logical, iterative, procedural creativity that programming requires. Having said all that, I do introduce my students to Inform (the most popular language for creating text adventures), in order to get them to appreciate the effort that goes into creating, beta-testing, and perfecting a computer game.

While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted. These non-programmers and non-designers are the ones who hired me, the ones who sign up to take my classes, and the ones who decide whether to publish the articles I write or the books I propose, and they're an important part of the audience for all the game study scholarship that's coming out.

I was recently told by a theatre history specialist that, although my background is English lit, my book on American Drama from 1920-1950 was worth recommending as a theatre history text. Art history and art practitioners, mathematicians and math teachers, politicians and speech writers, creative writers and copy editors... The intellectual life is full of uneasy pairings.

It’s because of the existence of literary criticism as a profession that people can major in English literature (which amounts to reading novels, poems, and plays, and talking about and writing about them). It’s because of the existence of film criticism as a profession that people can major in film studies (which amounts to watching movies, and talking and writing about them). And because the students are lining up to take these courses, schools can fund “artist in residence” programs, where established authors or filmmakers can do their thing, free (for a while, at least) from the pressures of producing something that will make money. If literature and film programs limited their focus to doing nothing but producing the next generation of creative writers or filmmakers, these programs wouldn’t have nearly the cultural capital that they do; in the market economy, producers need consumers, and educated, critical consumers are probably better for the long-term health of a genre. (I’ll save the elitism/populism debate for another day!)